Monday, June 24, 2013

The Hollywood Drug

The U.S. Food And Drug Administration has announced the creation of a commission to study whether Hollywood movies should be regulated as a drug. New research published in this month's New England Journal Of Medicine reports that the visual and sonic stimuli of time released explosions are altering the audience's brain chemistry, possibly with unknown long term effects.

Experiments done at the California Institute Of Technology examined the behavior of children between the ages of 4 and 7 as they learned to play computer games. The children exhibited a marked preference for games with the same story lines, instead of plot lines that diverged based on their own choices. They wanted the game to play the same way every time. Apparently movie goers are now expressing a similar preference, looking ahead to then viewing explosions in pattern unvaried by plot deviation.

The noise and tumult of the movies is thought to trigger an involuntary regression to the preferences of an earlier period of development.